Ectoplasm Pie
by SunlitDarkness
Summary: Chocoplasm Pie. Now being served at the Amity Park Nasty Burger for the foreseeable future.
1. Once a Human Being

Leo pulled up a grainy video feed that he'd taken from the Nasty Burger security and fast forwarded through the blandness of the day. He paused at Valerie cutting a direct line into the camera's blind spot, inspected it with intrigue, and identified the exact moment when an ectoplasm stained ghost showed up. Leo double checked the lock on his door and readjusted the web camera. He hit record.

"Will you take a look at that? Pretty pathetic, huh?" Leo drawled as the ghost floated in a circle. "Well you'll never believe this," he muttered as the spectre looked down at its tail and screamed silently on the screen, " but that ghost you're looking at was once a human being. And not just any human being, that kid was a scientist. A smart, acne-ridden ball of assholery." The ghost leaned against the wall only to turn intangible and fall backwards through it. Leo paused the video and started up the webcam.

"This is his story." Leo pointed emphatically at the screen. "Well, actually, my story," his words kept coming faster and faster, "that's right-I'm that ghost. The name is Leo," he took a breath. "Leo Ramirez."

"I was Amity's science guy, and I ruined my life for no-uh well, reasons. Not that hard to believe," Leo shrugged. "Look, I'll tell you what: you go back a ways, you know, before I was a ghost and this will all make sense."

Leo turned the recording back on his computer screen. He idly clicked through the pictures and pulled one up to full-size. "Dammit, now see, this is a little too far back. Oh! Look at me, that's me as a baby." With a tight smile, he clicked the next one over. A kid with a mop of fluffy dark hair grinned up at the camera from inside a box. "Er, ha. Let's move ahead."

Leo faced the webcam, addressing his future audience. "Okay, this is the real me. Not this." Two rings of light swept over him, leaving behind sickly slate grey skin and ephemeral hair. In place of his legs, there was a spectral tail. Leo could catch a glint of green from his eyes in the lens of the camera.

"This," Leo pulled the transformation to show his true face, "Not this," He waved his hand in the general vicinity of the rest of him.

"Winner." Leo quirked a human smile, though it didn't quite reach his brown eyes before he let the transformation settle as ghost. "Loser," his voice broke. Leo turned off the webcam and saved the raw footage to an encrypted folder.

He forced the transformation back to human and curled up in his bed. Lights flashed behind his eyes, and his dreams were haunted by a face streaked with ectoplasm and a wound that weeped and refused to close.

* * *

Leo set the video recorder in the antigravity, tethering it to a doorframe. He grinned. "Okay, see the Ghost Zone? Nobody in it pays attention to me. Check this out." Leo cupped his hands around his mouth, "Technus!?" A couple of the skeletons on the a drifting island tipped their skulls in his direction. The scientist's door remained firmly closed. He knocked, and the sound echoed despite the door remaining closed.

Leo shrugged at the camera. He raised his hands in a _what can you do?_ Gesture and twisted around when a door farther down opened. "Hi, Box Ghost."

The other ghost glanced furtively at Leo.

"Beware!" It's shriller than a man of his stature should sound. But Leo nodded and grinned while the Box Ghost frowned and darted back into his door with a _CLICK!_

Leo frowns and picks his video camera back up. There's the roar of something large, but that's hardly unusual in the Ghost Zone. Leo let himself drift, following an internal call to some other area. It crossed his mind to turn off the recording, but if he's taking the journal viewers on a tour, why not leave it on? He could always edit it out later.

There's a gust of motion-Leo's almost pulled along in the current of the ghost that zipped past him-headed towards the roaring he heard a little while ago.

 _Danny Phantom?_

The other ghost didn't slow, but the white hair and trademark black suit was recognizable. Leo focused his camera on the receding figure.

"And there goes the hero of Amity Park." He turned it back to himself.

"I wonder what that makes me."

* * *

 **So that's that.**

 **I have no update schedule to promise.  
I have no plot to promise.  
This is mostly just gonna be drabbles and scraps of this idea that I had one day and introduced to my friends and now it's here.**


	2. Two Roses for Ghosts

"Why do you have legs as Phantom?"

"Why doesn't the Chocoplasm Ghost have legs?"

Leo blinks and rolls his eyes, "First off, Chocoplasm Ghost isn't my name any more than Inviso-Bil was yours. Second off," he kicks at Danny underneath the library table, "I asked first."

"OW, I'm less dead than you, bitch?"

"That's not measurable. Besides, Inviso-Bil has more aggressive powers than Chocoplasm. Which means you're more ghostly and arguably more dead." Leo rubs at his temples while staring at the biography on the table, pretending to read. This assignment isn't helping his headache. The dry and dusty books call for him to just rest his head and his eyes.

"Pfft, aside from the Wail, Chocoplasm is totally on level with Phantom." Danny made a half-hearted annotation in the margins that looked suspiciously like 'Faulkner needs to shut up.'

Leo stops. "Okay, stop Danny. Don't try to play all sympathetic like your sister does. I can only handle that from one Fenton and only on occasion. It's not funny anymore." He stares at Danny, not threatening, just a heavy look without amusement. Just something a little less human and alive.

"Ramirez, you're a hybrid. You've gotta be tough. What do I have that you don't?" Danny

Leo sits back, ticking off the list on his fingers. "Ghostly wail, Ice powers, Duplication, and the ghost sense mist thing to start with, Fenton. Plus, I don't actually fight ghosts so everything else isn't as developed as yours outside of emotional distress."

"Your powers get weird with your emotions?"

Leo deadpans, "I pinned you and almost blasted your head off the other day because you were harassing Technus and endangering Wes. Pretty sure that all ghosts' powers get weird with emotion. Are you saying that your powers wouldn't amp up if I was raggin' on Tucker and/or Sam?"

"I thought that was what you could normally do."

"Hell no, just shut up and read," Leo snaps his book closed and grabs the next in the stack. Mr. Lancer glances at them for the first time in the period because unlike the Excuses Trio, he actually knows where to sit to be invisible. He settles in for the long game of ignoring Danny while pretending to actually get work done. He knows that focus isn't on his side this time. Within moments, there's a jabbing of the short story packet at his book.

"Can you check that I've got this right?"

"You're not stupid, Fenton; check it against the Sparknotes."

" _Ramirez,_ " Danny hisses.

Sighing through his nose, Leo pulled the papers onto his side of the table without putting down the book. _What can you do then?_ There's a lightning flash of terror for a heartbeat before he remembers that these are personal notes that Lancer's not collecting. Leo uncaps a pen with his teeth and closes the book with his fingers marking his place. _Make people stay away or come and help._

Danny rolls his eyes when he reads the scrawl.

"Like some of your powers aren't lame, snow queen."

Danny shrugged, "Okay, but like the Box Ghost…."

"GENTLEMEN," both teenagers jump at the sudden proximity of Lancer, "I appreciate your _concern_ with Amity's current events, but your pair is _specifically_ addressing Mr. Faulkner's struggles as an author." Danny fumbles for words. _Deer in the headlights._

"Er well, he grew up in the South and had romance struggles. But he listened to other people telling stories. And he wrote more experimentally during the same time as Hemmingway," Danny slows into a rambling explanation that flows with his thoughts. "Who kinda took writing into the _write with less words way_ , which _had_ to be annoying because Faulkner's just trying to do his thing and have people listen to the stories he's telling. But like, he also got a lot of awards for his writing and people still like it. And he writes the South pretty well for how he saw it, I think."

Lancer nods and turns to Leo. "And your thoughts on Faulkner, Mr. Ramirez?"

"He's a creep who wrote cringy, triggering things and some people rightfully objected. And I don't like him." The words are dry and sharp.

Lancer's eyebrows inch closer to the smooth crest of his head. "I can't tell you to like or not like any given literature, Mr. Ramirez. But for your other positions, do you have evidence?"

Leo reached over to Danny's packet and flipped it back to the front page. " _A Rose for Emily_ is about necrophilia, Mr. Lancer. She falls in love with a dude, kills him, and sleeps by his corpse every night. That's creepy." There's a snorting/choking noise, and in the corner of his vision, Danny can see Wes Weston's eyes bugging out. "And on top of that, the town HAD to know that something was up but they just made her house not stink. And the town _romanticized her._ "

Smiling, Mr. Lancer flips Leo's story packet to another of Faulkner's novellas. "Try this. I think, Mr. Ramirez, that you'll find that one story is hardly the whole of the person's capabilities. Nor is it what should allow you to judge the author so harshly."

The quiet of the library sits more hollowly. Danny doesn't ask about Leo's ghost again.

Leo keeps asking random things about Phantom.

* * *

 **I just really like Leo.**

 **He's my answer to a couple questions that eventually will be written about but not today.**


End file.
